Film Script

Communicating as a Group

Character Profiles

Detective Harvey Blaine: 

Harvey is undercover in the Bacalla gang, trying his best to leak information to the police while still keeping his cool. He has worked his way up the gang's hierarchy, becoming more entwined with the gang until he took the role of one of Lenny's two under-bosses. However, Harvey's downfall is perhaps due to him becoming too entwined with the people around him, and his sympathetic nature ends up coming back to bite him.

Scarlett Marcel:

Scarlett's brother had been a part of the Bacalla gang for many years, yet after trying to leave, Lenny killed him. Scarlett then became Lenny's 'property', being made to run a local cafe as a front for the gang's meeting place. She is visibly unhappy with her mistreatment, and confides in Harvey's caring touch. Harvey takes a risk to help Scarlett, but her allegiances are more ambiguous than they first seemed.

Lenny Bacalla:

Lenny Bacalla is at the top of the gang's hierarchy, and uses his wealth and power to control the people around him. His mob's powers span across the city's underground, including owning a local cafe and even a manufacturing warehouse. He is a dangerous man.

Practice Film Shot

At school, we experimented with a few different shot types  in preparation for creating our film, and this video illustrates our attempt at a continuous shots. We plan to use this shot type on location in the scene where we introduce our main characters.

Costume Ideas

As a group, we discussed what sort of clothing we wanted to dress our characters in, and concluded that the gang members should be dressed in suits. We decided on this outfit as the gang in our film are fairly sophisticated and wealthy, and should therefore appear similar to the gangs in other modern noir films like The Departed and Trance.

Our femme fatale, on the other hand, is of a significantly lower status than the other characters in the story, and works in a cafe owned by the gang's leader. Therefore, we decided that she should be dressed in items of clothing which match the iconography of her profession, including an apron and basic, casual clothes underneath. We thought we would dress her in a white t-shirt when she is first introduced, to make her seem as though she is a victim and is downtrodden by the gang. As the film progresses, however, we decided we would dress our femme fatale in a red t-shirt, which has semiotic connotations of danger, passion and love to emphasise her evolution into the manipulative double-crosser who betrays the men surrounding her.

Props List

Our film incorporates a number of different props:

• In the scenes based in the cafe, our waitress will be interacting with props usually associated with her job: a tray to carry drinks on and a cloth to wipe down tables. These props can easily be found on location, and so we have full access to these. 
• We also have access to a red cash box similar to the one in the image shown, which is important as it is a vital prop for our narrative. We will also need to either use our own money to put into the box or purchase fake notes from a prop shop in our town centre. 

• Finally, as our hero and femme fatale end up being tied to chairs in our final scene, we will need to source both rope and two chairs to move into our location. 

Deciding on our Locations

As our new idea takes place mostly in a cafe, we decided that my family's business, Taste Cafe in Baldock, would be a suitable location to use. This location is easy for all of the group members and actors to get to, as it is in the centre of the high street and is well-known in the surrounding area.
We also needed a dark, atmospheric location for our final scene, and after deliberating whether to use Kelsey's large van or my Dad's factory where he works, DBC Tools, we decided on the factory. We feel this setting suits our needs well, being easy to access and available to us after school times each day. I then went on Google maps to take pictures of the exact locations for future reference, in case anyone forgot where our settings were located.

Film Animatic

Film Title

Using the Iphone app SimpleMind+, we brainstormed possible names for our film.
As our film frequently uses the phrase 'rat', meaning a person who is disloyal, we began to think of names associated with this topic, like 'Mousetrap' and 'Rodent'.
However, we also liked the idea of having a title which linked to words associated with the cafe, and we eventually decided on the name 'Steam' for our film; as it not only links with the steam rising out of a cup of coffee, but the panic and agitation felt by our main character in his high-pressured situation.

A2 Media Film Noir Plot

This video demonstrates the evolution of our film noir narrative; from detective crime-drama, to unconventional revenge thriller, to finally a combination of the two:

Initial Narrative:                                                                   Second Narrative:

                                         
                                                                  Final Narrative: